Paris always had great places to take a leak. New York’s public restrooms at Bryant Park, outside of the New York Public Library, also astonish us (today) that so much effort was made to celebrate the accomplishment of our most basic bodily functions. Providence had at least two elegant comfort stations. One was at Exchange Place (Kennedy Plaza) and became the Plaza Café, run by Pat Cortelessa, longtime opponent of the late Buddy Cianci, mayor for 21 years, then expanded to become an intermodal transit station. The other was opposite the Providence Performing Arts Center on Weybosset Street, which was also expanded to become a police substation and ticket sales kiosk. The design of neither addition attempted to reflect the degree of beauty of the original public pissoirs, but neither did they try to box the originals on the ears, as is more common these days. The facility on Weybosset was recently trimmed back to its original size to serve as a folly in the street’s recent, but only partially satisfactory, renovation.

I was launched on this quest for rare Providence comfort station images by Carroll William (“Bill”) Westfall’s photo, sent to TradArch, of a public toilet in Torun, Poland, which he photographed in 1968. In response, Christopher Liberatos sent in a selection of Parisian toilets, some of which I’ve printed below, concluding with an apparent modernist pissoir attempt.

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About David Brussat

This blog was begun in 2009 as a feature of the Providence Journal, where I was on the editorial board and wrote a weekly column of architecture criticism for three decades. Architecture Here and There fights the style wars for classical architecture and against modern architecture, no holds barred. My freelance writing and editing on that topic and others addresses issues of design and culture locally and globally. I am a member of the board of the New England chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, which bestowed an Arthur Ross Award on me in 2002. I work from Providence, R.I., where I live with my wife Victoria, my son Billy and our cat Gato.
If you would like to employ my writing and editing to improve your work, please email me at my consultancy, dbrussat@gmail.com, or call 401.351.0457.
Testimonial: "Your work is so wonderful - you now enter my mind and write what I
would have written."
- Nikos Salingaros, mathematician at the University of Texas, architectural theorist and author of many books.